n recent UK wine news, Sussex has been grabbing headlines. It was were the big winner at the WineGB Awards on June 24, coming away with 61 medals. The county has also just won its own Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) for wines, a guarantee of quality like the French Appellation d’Origine Controlee (AOC) that confirms the authenticity of bottles from such high-value places as Champagne.
comes to a food and drink escape, is Kent. (It scored 60 medals at the WineGB Awards.)
For the last 20 years, Kent—the “Garden of England” in the country’s southeast that’s famous for the ancient cathedral city of Canterbury as well as seaside resorts—has been growing its wine business. In 2015, Patrick McGrath, managing director of the UK-based wine company Hatch Mansfield started Domaine Evremond in partnership with Champagne Taittinger, by purchasing a 69-hectare (171-acre) apple farm for £1.5 million ($1.83 million) and planting grapes. It was the first time that a Champagne house bought land in England with the intention of making world-class sparkling wine.
Now, McGrath is betting on the growth of wine tourism, both for his winery and for Kent in general. Early results are promising. Sales of English and Welsh wines leaped from 5.5 million bottles in 2019 to 9.3 million bottles in 2021, and visits to UK vineyards and wineries rose by 57% last year over those in 2020.